How long before PM by-default Starmer becomes deeply unpopular?

If Keir Starmer makes Tory austerity cuts permanent, privatises more of the NHS, and refuses to combat inequality and the housing crisis, he's going to become an awful lot more unpopular.

Jul 05, 2024

Despite his enormous new parliamentary majority, Keir Starmer has the lowest public approval rating of any incoming Prime Minister, and two thirds of Labour voters admitted that the main reason they endorsed him was solely to get rid of the Tories.

It’s a mark of Starmer’s lack of popular appeal that he attracted 600,000 fewer Labour votes than Jeremy Corbyn managed in the 2019 rout, and a whopping 3.2 million fewer than Labour achieved in 2017.

It’s down to the absurd disproportionality of Britain’s archaic voting system that almost five million votes fewer than Boris Johnson got in 2019 has been enough to hand Starmer a majority twice the size of Bodgers!

The numbers don’t lie. Starmer didn’t win this election, he became Prime Minister by default because of the Tory implosion.

Despite this thumping majority that the Tory meltdown has handed him, Starmer’s starting off from the least popular position any new Prime Minister has ever faced.

During the election campaign he was determined to make even more enemies for himself, inexplicably rabble-rousing against Bangladeshis; goading Remainers by pledging his lifelong allegiance to Boris Johnson’s Brexit bodge; spewing transphobic bile; and gloating that Rupert Murdoch’s evil propaganda minions at the S*n have endorsed him.

Running the country is not a popularity contest, so perhaps telling the people of Liverpool, the LGBTQ+ community, Europhiles, and British Bangladeshis to go fuck themselves during an election campaign isn’t so bad? I mean Boris Johnson won in 2019 despite his proven litany of abuse, bigotry, and conspiracy theories aimed at working class people, women, gays, blacks, Jews …

However, when a Prime Minister comes to power promising "Change" but delivers an insipid policy platform of "more of the same" right-wing economic madness that favours corporations, property owners, and the mega-rich at the expense of everyone else, they’re likely to lose whatever popularity they had pretty quickly.

Starmer is insistent that he’s going to stick to Tory spending plans so that their 14 years of austerity cuts are made permanent; he’s plotting to further privatise the NHS; he refuses to countenance real policies to alleviate the housing crisis; his loyalty is to privatisation profiteers rather than the people and the country that they’re bleeding dry with their greed; and he won’t even reverse the Tories’ despicable Two-Child policy that’s needlessly driven hundreds of thousands of kids into destitution.

It’s obviously not helpful to piss off significant demographics, specific communities, and the entire city of Liverpool, but the factor that’s really going to determine how much he’s hated in the coming years is his stone-hearted refusal to do anything to make ordinary people’s lives any better.

He explicitly asked people to vote Labour to get the Tories out, but behind the scenes he’s just as committed as any Tory to the Westminster agenda of serving the interests of the rich, while punishing the rest of us with austerity ruination, under-investment, privatisation scams, and poverty-spreading social security cutbacks.

When people wake up to the fact that changing the colour of the rosettes has done nothing to improve the material conditions of their lives, Starmer is going to be the conduit for their anger and disappointment.

And when he tries to excuse his failings in that irritating and condescending tone of his, using economically illiterate excuses cribbed directly from David Cameron’s diabolical austerity government ("bankrupt Britain", “no money left", “difficult choices", "no magic money tree") , it’s only going to make things worse.

The big challenge will be to ensure there’s some kind of cohesive left-leaning, socially liberal movement ready to capitalise on his unpopularity, because if they don’t, Farage’s fanatics and whatever horror the Tory party morphs into certainly will.